Word: theseus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Many years have passed since my rasslin' days," said the late Herman Hickman, who tried grunt-and-groan for a while before he graduated to football coaching, "but I know there have been few legitimate professional matches since Theseus laid down the wrestling rules in 900 B.C. I even have my doubts about whether that historic match between Ulysses and Ajax was a shoot. I still don't think you can get a better night's entertainment than you will by seeing your favorite hero tangle with a villain. This plot has had the longest...
...KING MUST DIE, by Mary Renault. No great novelist but an eminently able literary archaeologist, Author Renault dug up the year's best piece of historical fiction. Her telling of the bloody Theseus story and her meticulously detailed view of ancient Mediterranean life is a notable achievement...
Into the Maze. The heart of the story is known even to schoolboys. Theseus, recently acknowledged son of the King of Athens, one morning finds the city draped in black. He is told that the city must send a human tribute of seven young men and seven maidens to Crete, where they are to be put into a maze called the labyrinth and devoured by a fearsome creature, half-man, half-bull, called the Minotaur. Either by lot or insistence, Theseus becomes one of the seven youths and sets sail for Crete. There he wins the love of Ariadne...
...whole myth, with all its subplots, is a good deal more labyrinthine than that, and Author Renault threads her way as skillfully through it as Theseus did through the Minotaur's cave. Much of it is a sheer adventure yarn, full of javelin-play, wrestling, bull dancing (the Cretan version of bullfighting) and those gory sudden deaths and bloody double dealings to which the ancient Greeks were so prone that they probably invented the serene idea of the "golden mean" as an antidote...
...Bronze Age. Theseus' character, as Author Renault develops it, is much like that of a modern adolescent gang leader, ready at any moment for a rumble with the neighboring gang. This rings truer to the spirit of the Bronze Age than Theseus' self-conscious habit of consulting his destiny every 15 minutes like a watch. While the heroes of the classic tragedies inevitably yield to their fate, Author Renault's Theseus seems a proto-conformist in his anxiety to learn and submit to the will of the gods...